Profile

Trevor Burgess

Concepts
For several years I have been making paintings inspired by people's everyday lives in the urban space of the city.
Recently I have been working on a series of paintings of people's homes in London, entitled "A Place to Live". The starting point for the pictures was estate agents' adverts in newspapers. a source which furnished me with a topography of images of residential architecture in the city. From this, I have pieced together a pictorial anthology of the urban environment, drawing upon visual experiences that will be familiar to anyone who has spent time in the city.
Influences
I am influenced by what I see around me. Images of all sorts can affect and influence my painting. There is generally a slow incubation period between identifying images that spark my interest, and resolving these into paintings.
Career path
I studied literature at the University of East Anglia. Following this I trained as Assistant Curator at the Norwich Gallery, Norwich School of Art for four years. I set up the Warehouse Artists Studios in Norwich where I based my practice for seven years. During this period I was closely involved with the artist-run studio movement, and worked with the National Artists Association to launch a Code of Practice for the Visual Arts. I took part in the site specific exhibition, Wholesale in 1996, for which I filled the walls of a former cold store with a decorative cycle of 18 paintings of massed fruit and vegetable produce. In the same year my work was selected for the Kettles Yard Open, and the International Triennial of Painting, Sofia, Bulgaria.
In 1997 I moved to Barcelona, studying on the Winchester School of Art MA European Fine Art. During the MA I produced a series of large, figurative paintings exploring the relationships of families and children, which, following my graduation in 1998, were exhibited in a solo exhibition at the Galerie Daniel Wahrenberger, Zurich, Switzerland. In Barcelona I also made a series of work about Castellers, the popular Catalan custom of creating human towers as a street display. These pictures explored relationships between people, engaged in a highly structured, public, social activity. The Castellers were exhibited at a solo exhibition at the Galeria Groc in Barcelona and toured in Catalonia.
Following my return to the UK in 1999, I developed my current series of work influenced by the urban environment. In 2007 I showed this work in solo exhibitions in Spain in cultural centres in the towns of El Campello, Alicante, and Blanca, Murcia, and at the Liceo de Alicante. In 2011 six paintings from the series "A Place to Live" were selected by Time Out critic Ossian Ward for The Discerning Eye 2011 at the Mall Galleries, and one of these paintings won The Regional Artist Award for the South East. The artist Eileen Hogan invited me to show more images from the series as part of the 2013 Discerning Eye. In autumn 2014 I am curating an exhibition "Painting the City" at the Lion and Lamb, London. The exhibition will show paintings exploring visual experience of the city, internationally by artists Mark Crofton Bell, Trevor Burgess, Chris Carter, Aida Rubio Gonzalez, Marguerite Horner, Matthew Krishanu, Lee Maelzer, Jock McFadyen abd Tanmoy Samanta.read full statement